In general, robots have been developed for the industrial use and played as a part of the factory automation. In recent years, the field of application of robots has been expanded and medical robots and space robots have been developed. In addition, home robots that can be used in home have been developed.
A representative of the home robot is a robot cleaner wherein the robot cleaner represents an apparatus configured to automatically clean an area to be cleaned by suctioning foreign materials, e.g., dust, from a floor surface while traveling the area to be cleaned without user intervention. The robot cleaner detects obstacles placed in a cleaning area through a variety of sensors, and controls a driving path and a cleaning operation of the robot cleaner based on the detection result.
The initial robot cleaner performs a random cleaning while driving by itself and an area in which the cleaning cannot be cleaned may occur due to the presence of the obstacle and the condition of the floor surface. In order to compensate for this, techniques have been developed in which the cleaning is performed by dividing all the areas to be cleaned, i.e., the entire cleaning area into a plurality of cleaning areas or cells, or the cleaning is performed in a way of generating a cleaning map of the entire cleaning area and diving the generated cleaning map into an area already cleaned and an area to be cleaned.